Art and technology: archiving video games for

humanities research in university libraries

Kelli Wood AND David S. Carter

Abstract

O ver the past half-century video games have become a significant part of our cultural environment,

in part, by leading advances in both technology and artistic innovation. In recent years librarians

and researchers have recognized these games as cultural objects that require collection and curation.

Developing and maintaining collections of this fast moving and somewhat ephemeral media, however,

poses challenges due to constantly advancing technology and a corresponding lack of consistent

terminology. This article addresses the literature and critical issues surrounding collections of video

games within libraries and presents a case study of the University of Michigan’s Computer and Video

Game Archive (CVGA), one of the largest academic archives of its kind. Moreover, video games are

situated in a humanistic approach to the field of game studies as the article draws on the relevance of

methods from art history and film studies.

Introduction

In April 1962 the first issue of the newsletter for the Digital Equipment Computer

Users’ Society announced both the establishment of a “program library” at the

Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and the nascent popularity of the video

game SPACEWAR at MIT (see Fig. 1). The program library would be managed by

Beverly Clohset, a graduate of Central Michigan University with an interest in

mathematics, and its purpose was to test and catalogue programs written for

DEC’s PDP-1 computer for the benefit of users.1 In the same month, Steve Russell

and fellow MIT students were perfecting SPACEWAR, one of the first examples of

a video game as we understand them today (see Fig. 2). Collaborators Dan

Edwards and Martin Graetz reported to Decuscope newsletter editor Elsa

Newman: “. . .SPACEWAR is an exciting game for two players, many kibitzers, and

a PDP-1. The game starts with each player in control of a spaceship (displayed on

PDP’s scope face) equipped with propulsion rockets, rotation gyros, and space

torpedos.” By the summer on 1962 the inventors of SPACEWAR dispersed to

different institutions, bringing copies of the video game with them. Graetz

reported that program tapes were already showing up all over the country on any

research computer with a CRT -- perhaps copies obtained through the DEC

library.2

The 1962 Decuscope newsletter elucidates how the proliferation of new for-

mats of information and the need for libraries to store and circulate that media

responded to the co-evolution of computer technology and early video game

development. Over half a century later, video games have blossomed into one of

the most prevalent forms of media in the world and remain at the forefront of not

only technological, but also artistic, innovation. As a result, university libraries

began including video games in their collections to support research across dis-

ciplines as well as for their entertainment value. This article considers the state of

current university library collections of video games and includes a review of

recent literature of the topic that addresses cataloging, selection criteria, circula-

tion, and the creation of game laboratories. It proceeds with a case study of the

University of Michigan library’s Computer & Video Game Archive, including

concerns and best practices for archiving technology, lab set up and operations,

and interdisciplinary pedagogy and research. Finally, the article examines the

1. Decuscope: Information for

Digital Equipment Computer

Users 1, no. 1 (April 1962): 1-4.

2. J. M. Graetz, “The Origin of

Spacewar,” Creative Computing 7,

no. 8 (August 1981): 66.

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Copyright © ARLIS 2018 doi:10.1017/alj.2018.29 185

relevance of libraries in fostering research on video games in the arts and

humanities disciplines. By situating video games within the emerging and

evolving field of game studies and including methodologies from film studies and

art history, the article concludes by calling for the necessity for the incorporation

of still and video image captures of video games within image databases pro-

duced by visual resources centers.

Video games in university libraries

In the introduction of Jesper Juul’s now essential text Half-Real: Video games

between real and fictional worlds, Jull defines games as ‘transmedial,’ meaning

that the system and rules of a game permutes across media -- such as being able

to play chess on either a wooden board or a computer.3 A key challenge in col-

lecting and cataloguing video games in libraries is managing their transmedial

state and various formats across interfaces. Video games as a popularly under-

stood category appear on cartridges played on early consoles such as the Atari

2600 or Nintendo Entertainment System, programs and disks run on computers

such as the Commodore 64 or Apple IIGS, CDs run on fifth and sixth generation

on consoles such as PlayStation or Xbox, handheld devices from the Nintendo

Fig. 2. Spacewar! running on the PDP-1 at The Computer History Museum.

Photograph by Joi Ito, CC-BY-2.0.

Fig. 1. The first issue of Decuscope: Information for Digital Equipment Computer

Users, April 1962.

3. Jesper Juul, Half-real. Video

Games between Real Rules and.

Fictional Worlds (Cambridge MA:

The MIT Press, 2005), 7.

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186

Game Boy to the Switch, server based games and digital downloads for com-

puters, phones, and tablets, as well as immersive virtual reality environments

such as the CAVE platform.

Greta de Groat has charted the history of cataloguing practices for the varied

formats of video games in U.S. libraries, including changes in ALA and Library of

Congress rules, noting that rapidly evolving technology has often resulted in a lag

in accessioning and accurately and consistently describing of video games in

catalogues. De Groat concludes that the collocation of video games has suffered

from a lack of consistent terminology, for example that the Library of Congress

makes a distinction between video games and computer games, but that recent

updates to RDA and MARC standards are improving.4 Zach Welhouse, Jin Ha Lee,

and Jennifer Bancroft have proposed a regular and controlled vocabulary for

describing the narrative features of video games in order to catalogue them

according to their plot.5

While some libraries began to casually include video games into their collec-

tions, others actively and intentionally built collections of games. In 2007, Danielle

Kane, Catherine Soehner, and Wei Wei documented the creation of a game lab

and library collection at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in response to the

creation of the a new interdisciplinary degree in game design. The library started

with a core of 15 games on reserve on different consoles. Librarians had selected

the games based on the quality of content (judged by the technical merit and

aesthetic quality of graphics, sound, gameplay, and value), as well as the con-

siderations of maintenance, ease of use, cost, and language.6 Elizabeth Tappeiner

and Catherine Lyons examined a number of libraries in order to create selection

criteria for the acquisition of games, including practical considerations of equip-

ment, the usefulness for teaching objectives, relevance of content for real world

skills, and the historical and cultural value of video games.7 Because the preva-

lence of violent and sexual content in video games may raise issues of censorship

for librarians wishing to provide access to materials needed for research, dedi-

cated content specialists should be relied upon to make decisions about which

games to acquire.8

Mary Laskowski and David Ward identify three main reasons for incorporating

video games into academic library collections: to support faculty research, to

support classroom instruction, and for the entertainment and curricular needs of

students. They call for a collaboration between these areas, suggesting that

libraries can become an important nexus for this field of research.9 Faye Chadwell

has agreed, asserting the centrality of video games to the mission of academic

libraries despite a few studies that have suggested their inclusion is untenable

given widespread budgetary constraints.10 Cécile Swiatek and Myriam Gorsse

have also argued for the inclusion of games in libraries, suggesting librarians

shift focus away from entertainment toward interactive learning that can be

facilitated by new staff roles such as ‘Game Manager’ and ‘Game Designer,’ while

public librarian Ball Gallaway provides a guide for organizing an

entertainment-leaning collection of video games.11

Diane Robson and Patrick Durkee’s approach focuses on the development of

collections in academic libraries. They summarize that promoting access to digital

and internet games, in particular curated collections of independent and artistic

games, will be crucial for the future of studying games as the field evolves

technologically.12 Carleton University Librarians Emma Cross, David Mould, and

Robert Smith also discuss how to approach collections management in the face

of a shift from console based gaming to newer technologies and online platforms.

In particular they note how digital rights management will be a key factor in the

future of collecting video games.13

Over a dozen major university libraries have actively publicized video games

collections in recent years. Stanford University has pioneered video game col-

lections in academic libraries, archiving over 3,200 video games and numerous

consoles in their Media & Microtext Center. Stanford also houses the Stephen

Cabrinety archives, which includes computer hardware, hand-held games, lit-

erature, and documents on the formative years of the microcomputing gaming

industry.14 Between 2007 and 2010 several public university libraries in the United

States began collecting and circulating video games, including the University of

Michigan, University of North Texas, the University of Oregon, and UC Santa

Cruz.15 In the United Kingdom in 2008, Nottingham Trent University, Bath Spa

University and the National Media Museum in Bradford collaborated to create a

digital collection of video games.16 In Canada, the University of Calgary created

4. Greta de Groat, “A History of

Video Game Cataloging in U.S.

Libraries,” Cataloging &

Classification Quarterly 53, no. 2

(2015): 135-156.

5. Zach Welhouse, Jin Ha Lee,

and Jennifer Bancroft, ‘“What Am

I Fighting For?”: Creating a

Controlled Vocabulary for Video

Game Plot Metadata.’ Cataloging

& Classification Quarterly 53, no. 2

(2015): 157-189.

6. Danielle Kane, Catherine

Soehner and Wei Wei, “Building a

Collection of Video Games in

Support of a Newly Created

Degree Program at the University

of California, Santa Cruz”, Science

& Technology Libraries, 27, no. 4

(2007): 83.

7. Elizabeth Tappeiner and

Catherine Lyons, “Selection

Criteria for Academic Video Game

Collections”, Collection Building,

27, no. 3 (2008): 121–125.

8. As has been the case at the

library at Carleton University, see

Emma Cross, David Mould, and

Robert Smith, “The Protean

Challenge of Game Collections at

Academic Libraries,” New Review

of Academic Librarianship 21, no.

2 (May 4, 2015): 137.

9. Mary Laskowski and David

Ward, “Building Next Generation

Video Game Collections in

Academic Libraries,” Journal of

Academic Librarianship 35, no. 3

(May 2009): 267–73.

10. Faye Chadwell, “What’s Next

for Collection Management and

Managers? Games and Gaming in

Academic Libraries.” Collection

Management 36, no. 4 (2011):

198–202.

11. C. Swiatek and M. Gorsse,

“Playing games at the Library:

Seriously?” LIBER Quarterly 26,

no. 2 (2016): 83–101; Beth

Gallaway Game On! Gaming at

the Library (New York, NY:

Neal-Schuman Publishers, 2009).

12. Diane Robson and Patrick

Durkee, “New Directions for

Academic Video Game

Collections: Strategies for

Acquiring, Supporting, and

Managing Online Materials,”

Journal of Academic Librarianship

38, no. 2 (Mar. 2012): 79–84.

13. Emma Cross, David Mould,

and Robert Smith, “The Protean

Challenge of Game Collections at

Academic Libraries,” New Review

of Academic Librarianship 21, no.

2 (May 4, 2015): 140.

14. “Guide to the Stephen

M. Cabrinety Collection in the

History of Microcomputing, ca.

1975-1995.” Stanford University,

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187

the Games and Related Media Collection to house video game consoles from

Pont to Intellevision and Colecovision alongside over 2000 game titles.17

University libraries have also begun incorporating popular and critically suc-

cessful video games into their collections for entertainment and research,

including Virginia Commonwealth University, Michigan State, and the University

of Delaware.18

Shannon Farrell, Amy Neeser, and Carolyn Bishoff have conducted

interview-based qualitative research on the use of video games at the University

of Minnesota in order to ascertain the information and technology needs of

scholars and to develop a strategic approach to video games services that could

be extrapolated to other libraries.19 Their findings noted that scholars in the

humanities and social sciences had a strong need for books and journals in

addition to video games themselves to support research, and they conclude that

collaborative and a multidisciplinary approach to collection development would

best serve universities as a whole. Moreover they note that an unwillingness or

inability for video game companies to partner with academic libraries is an issue

needs to be further explored, but libraries can partner with one another to over-

come barriers to access.

A key point of agreement in the existing literature on video games in academic

libraries is the relevance and importance of the establishment of game labora-

tories in order to facilitate the archiving and upkeep of game consoles and

equipment, the circulation of video games, and a point of access for both enter-

tainment and teaching. The Computer & Video Game Archive, at the University of

Michigan is one of the oldest and most expansive of such game labs, and as a

case study, it could be considered a model for the implementation of video game

collections at other universities.

The Computer & Video Game Archive, at the University of Michigan

The UM Computer and Video Game Archive (CVGA) opened in the fall of 2008

(see Fig. 3). It currently houses nearly 8,000 games from over seventy different

systems, as well as board and card games, tabletop roleplaying games, and

various secondary sources and ephemera. In 2017 the CVGA welcomed nearly

5,000 visitors and recorded usage of over 16,000 items from the collection. The

CVGA collects digital and analog games from the early 1970s to the present day.

Open to the public Monday through Friday, the main CVGA archive room is

located in the basement of the Duderstadt Center, a digital commons on the

University of Michigan’s North Campus that also houses the Art, Architecture &

Engineering Library. In the archive room, users are able to browse the collection

Fig. 3. Computer & Video Game Archive at the University of Michigan.

Manuscripts Division, Special

Collections M0997, https://oac.

cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/

kt529018f2/.

15. “University of North Texas

Gaming Collection,” https://www.

library.unt.edu/collections/

media-library/gaming; Laurie

Bridges, Uta Hussong, and

Margaret Mellinger, “Circulating

Video Game Collections in the

Academic Library,” (Corvallis, OR:

Oregon State University Libraries,

2008), https://ir.library.

oregonstate.edu/concern/parent/

9p290b95r/file_sets/9k41zf996;

Danielle Kane, Catherine Soehner

and Wei Wei, “Building a

Collection of Video Games in

Support of a Newly Created

Degree Program at the University

of California, Santa Cruz”, Science

& Technology Libraries, 27, no. 4

(2007): 77–87.

16. David Crookes, “Curators at

The British Library have begun the

process of archiving videogame

websites,” https://www.

independent.co.uk/life-style/

gadgets-and-tech/news/british-

library-starts-videogame-website-

archive-project-6858507.html .

17. Chris Nelson, “Gaming

Reaches into Far Corners of

Academic World as U of C Builds

Huge Collection,” Calgary Herald

(Mar. 16, 2015), http://

calgaryherald.com/news/local-

news/gaming-reaches-into-far-

corners-of-academic-world-as-u-

of-c-builds-huge-collection

18. Brian McNeill, “VCU Libraries

Launches Collection of Critically

Acclaimed Video Games,” VCU

News (blog), Nov. 6, 2014, http://

news.vcu.edu/article/VCU_

Libraries_launches_collection_of_

critically_acclaimed_video ; “Univ.

of Delaware Video Game

Collection,” https://library.udel.

edu/filmandvideo/video-game-

collection/ ; “Michigan State Video

Game Labs,” https://lib.msu.edu/

gaming/ .

19. Shannon Farrell, Amy Neeser,

and Carolyn Bishoff, “Academic

Uses of Video Games: A

Qualitative Assessment of

Research and Teaching Needs at a

Large Research University,”

College and Research Libraries 78,

no. 5 (2017): 675.

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188

of games on the shelves and play the games at one of twenty different gaming

stations (including a semi-private room for motion and VR gaming and large

tables for playing board games). Since the CVGA maintains both software and

hardware for the digital games, the collection is limited to in-house use. During

hours of operation the archive is attended to by one or more CVGA staff, typically

student workers or the CVGA Manager (a full-time staff position).20

Acquisitions, collection, and preservation

The CVGA main collections include primary sources in the form of console

games, handheld games, microcomputer games, as well as secondary sources of

books about games (including academic monographs, player’s guides, game

novelizations, and graphic novels) and gaming magazines. 21 The archive

includes over fifty different gaming platforms, ranging from the Atari 2600 and

TRS-80 to the Microsoft Xbox One and Sony PlayStation 4 (see Figs. 4–6).22 While

the majority of the collection is focused on English language games, the early

primacy and influence of Japanese games and producers is also reflected in the

archive (see Fig. 7). All games have been cataloged and can be found through the

library’s discovery system. Items for the collection are selected by the Video

Game Archivist in accordance with the CVGA collection policy.23

Issues regarding the collection and preservation of video games often mirror

the issues involved in any archival collection, but there are several concerns

related to these particular formats. As with many popular culture collections, it

can be difficult to acquire old items in good condition. While some types of vin-

tage games can be acquired through online retailers and auction houses, others

can be difficult to track down. Particularly elusive, for example, are microcom-

puter games from the 1970s and early 1980s -- an era in which some main modes

of distribution were via plastic bags at flea markets or pages executable code

(intended to be retyped by hand) published in computer magazines. Donations

can be helpful in such instances, as has been the case with nearly half of the UM

CVGA collection. Moreover, a representative game archive will not only need to

manage many different media formats (solid state cartridges, cassette tapes,

magnetic discs, optical discs, digital downloads, etc.), but it must also maintain

the equipment on which to access and play the games. Some of these formats are

more volatile than others: while game cartridges from the 1970s and 1980s have

Fig. 4. Video game consoles and microcomputers from the 1970s and 1980s at

the Computer & Video Game Archive, University of Michigan.

20. For the CVGA’s use policy and

day-to-day operations, see: https://

www.lib.umich.edu/computer-

video-game-archive/cvga-use-

policies

21. For an extensive—though not

exhaustive—list of gaming sys-

tems and microcomputers avail-

able in the CVGA, see: https://

www.lib.umich.edu/computer-

video-game-archive/cvga-

available-systems

22. For a full list of the holdings of

the CVGA, visit: https://www.lib.

umich.edu/computer-video-game-

archive/cvga-available-systems

23. See https://www.lib.umich.

edu/mlibrary-collections/

collection-area-computer-and-

video-game-archive

43 / 4 2018

189

Fig. 6. Video game consoles from the 1990s at the Computer & Video Game

Archive, University of Michigan.

Fig. 5. Mario Bros (1983) played on the Atari 2600, at the Computer & Video

Game Archive, University of Michigan.

43 / 4 2018

190

proven to be remarkably hearty, each time a game is loaded from a cassette tape

may be the last.

When the CVGA was planned, a conscious decision was made to allow for the

indiscriminate playing of the games within the confines of the CVGA space, and

as such materials are stored and used on site and cannot be checked out of the

library (see Fig. 8). While a more “white glove” approach to the archive could

have been taken, UM librarians felt it was important to have the games be played

and experienced as determined by the archive users, allowing for exploration and

discovery. Inevitably this has led to some drawbacks, as games that are played

are games that suffer from wear, especially in the case of controllers. Strategies

for mitigating wear and loss have included storing optical materials in archival

sleeves, learning basic repair techniques, and keeping a cache of replacement

systems and controllers.

Mission and uses

The primary mission of the CVGA is to support the teaching and research inter-

ests of students, faculty and staff at the University of Michigan as it relates to

games. To this end, the CVGA hosts classes related to game studies and game

creation, and supports class-directed and independent research. As game studies

is a multidisciplinary field, the students and researchers come from departments

all over campus, including art, music, history, literature, education, psychology,

and many others.24 Frequently instructors and researchers focus on games as

creative or artistic works, taking the games as texts to be studied in much the

same way as one would examine novels, plays, poetry, movies, or paintings. The

extensive and historical nature of the CVGA’s collections has made it possible for

researchers to explore such research topics as race and ethnicity in all of the FIFA

games, or race as an option in character generation in dozens of different role

playing games (both in digital and analog format). Other topics explored using

the CVGA collections include the role of time in games, using the Legend of Zelda

Fig. 7. Nintendo Famicom, released in Japan in1986, at the Computer & Video

Game Archive, University of Michigan.

24. For a list of courses that have

made use of the CVGA, see: http://

guides.lib.umich.edu/c.php?g=

282989&p=5955147

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191

series as a case study, and games based on historical traumas, particularly the

American Civil War.

Games can also be used as examples or enticements to learn about other

related topics. At the University of Michigan, a popular course in the music

department introduced non-music majors to concepts of music theory and ana-

lysis through video game music. Another example was a class on the History of

the Samurai, where students studying the depiction of samurai in literature and

other popular creative works used the CVGA for a class session on samurai in

video games. In another instance, a senior-level game creation course in the

computer science department, where students studying advanced team pro-

gramming used the collection of the CVGA for inspiration. Other creative uses of

the CVGA have involved using the games in the collection as tools for an

unassociated field, such as in an engineering class wherein students studied the

effects of texting while driving by having their subjects attempt to play a racing

game while using their cell phones, or a joint project between the CVGA and the

Language Resource Center that used board games to improve the instructional

English skills of graduate student instructor hopefuls for whom English was not

their primary language.

Fig. 8. On site shelving of video game cartridges in the Computer & Video

Game Archive University of Michigan.

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192

When the CVGA is not reserved for classroom or research use, it is also

available to students, faculty, staff and the general public for open recreational

gaming. Such use is encouraged, allowing for people to play old games they may

have only heard about, or get together with friends between classes to play

popular games such as first person shooters such as Halo or Call of Duty, music

games such as Guitar Hero, or sports games such as the FIFA series. This serves

not only the entertainment needs of students, but it also introduces them to the

CVGA as a resource that they may later employ for a class project.

Arts and humanities research on video games

Video game labs such as the Computer & Video Game Archive at the University of

Michigan have the potential to shape and support emerging fields of research

under the umbrella of game studies. Game studies is a relatively new subfield

that focuses on the play of games in and of itself, considering the cultural activ-

ities and material artifacts of games that intersect between many disciplines, from

anthropology and history to textual studies and computer science. Dutch histor-

ian Johan Huizinga wrote perhaps the seminal work in the creation of game

studies, Homo Ludens: a study of the play element in culture.25 Huizinga sought

to answer the question ‘what is the nature of play and what is its significance in

society?’ He concluded that play is indeed serious and fundamental to culture.

Authors looking to sociology, such as Roger Caillois, have interpreted games as

cultural performances, representations of society in which members produce

their individual and collective identities.26 Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning situated

the role of sport in society within a framework of mimetic activities in spare time,

looking to an Aristotle’s considerations of mimesis in relation to poetry and

drama.27

The innovation and proliferation of video games in the past decades has

initiated further debates and lines of inquiry within the field of game studies. A

central methodological question for game studies has been the debate between

the approaches ludology vs. narratology. Narratology seeks to see games

through the meanings they create, the narrative they disseminate, while ludology

focuses on the gameness of the game, its structure, rules, mode of play, and how

that creates meaning. Joost Raessens and Jeffery Goldstein’s early Handbook of

computer game studies emphasizes the necessity of a multidisciplinary approach

to games, beginning with a historical and technological lens on the development

of video games, moving to a designer’s perspective on game creation, to a clinical

psychological approaches to the effects of playing video games alongside

empirical laboratory studies, and finally considering issues of aesthetics and

identity.28 In particular Anna Everett’s chapter, “Serious Play: Playing with Race in

Contemporary Gaming Culture” and her subsequent work asks salient questions

about the moral implications of pleasurable racism in video games, the embodied

experiences of minority players of video games, and the promulgation of racial

narratives.29

Humanities fields, including cinema and media studies, design studies, visual

and material culture, and art history, have also begun to generate significant

scholarship within game studies. Alexander Galloway has taken a philosophical

approach to video games within media studies, teasing apart how the formal

qualities of video games have not only an aesthetic, but also political, impact,

such as in the case of the origin of the first person shooter and the gaze.30

Jasmina Kallay has looked at video game’s impact on cinema, questioning the

divide placed between the two categories on the basis of interactivity in her dis-

section of narrative and special architectures.31 Part II of Mark J.P. Wolf and

Bernard Perron’s The Routledge companion to video game studies further tackles

“Formal aspects” such as art, color, and perspective, focusing on methods from

media studies.32 While the category of art is rarely defined or analyzed from an art

historical perspective, the repeated query “Are video games art?” pervades many

discussions of formal qualities and aesthetics. Brian Schrank’s Avant-Garde

videogames: Playing with technoculture begins with a resounding affirmative,

stating that indeed video games are art before exploring radical and avant-garde

games influenced by contemporary art movements.33 John Sharp in Works of

game: On the aesthetics of games and art takes the discussion further, showing

how contemporary artists have coopted the medium, formal qualities, and aes-

thetics of video games in their artworks.34

25. Johan Huizinga, Homo

Ludens: A Study of the Play

Element in Culture (London:

Routledge & Kegen Paul, 1949).

26. Roger Caillois, Man, Play and

Games, trans. by Meyer Barash

(London: Thames and Hudson,

1962).

27. Norbert Elias and Eric

Dunning, eds., The quest for

excitement: sport and leisure in

the civilizing process (Oxford;

New York: B. Blackwell, 1986).

28. Joost Raessens and Jeffery

Goldstein, eds., Handbook of

Computer Game Studies

(Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press,

2005).

29. Anna Everett, Digital Diaspora

A Race for Cyberspace (Albany:

SUNY Press, 2009).

30. Alexander Galloway, Gaming:

Essays on Algorithmic Culture,

Electronic Medications 18

(Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 2006).

31. Jasmina Kallay, Gaming Film:

How Games are Reshaping

Contemporary Cinema (New York:

Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

32. Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard

Perron, eds., The Routledge

Companion to Video Game

Studies (New York: Routledge,

2014). There have been several

earlier iterations of this work, see:

Mark Wolf and Bernard Perron,

eds., The Video Game Theory

Reader (New York: Routledge,

2003).

33. Brian Schrank, Avant-Garde

Videogames: Playing with

Technoculture (MIT Press, 2014).

34. John Sharp, Works of Game:

On the Aesthetics of Games and

Art (MIT Press, 2015).

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193

While several museums have opened in order to preserve computer and video

games as historical artifacts, such as the Computerspielemuseum in Berlin,

VIGAMUS: The Video Game Museum of Rome, the International Center for the

History of Electronic Games at the Strong National Museum of Play, or “Hot

Circuits: A Video Arcade” the first video game exhibit curated by Rochelle Slovin

at the American Museum of the Moving Image, recent exhibitions have sought to

place video games within the discourse of art and contemporary art history. For

example, The art of video games exhibition and catalogue by Chris Melissinos

and Patrick O’Rourke at the Smithsonian American Art Museum resolved the

tension between video games as a popular and commercial medium and their

visual, formal, and interactive potentials as art forms.35 The upcoming exhibition

at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Videogames: Design/play/disruptwill focus on

the design process of contemporary video game art. Smaller galleries and exhi-

bitions too have emphasized video games as art, such as the Video Game Art

Gallery in Chicago, IL and its companion journal, The VGA reader.

In the context of video games as art, libraries have the potential to enable and

shape the field based on the resources they provide and how they curate

knowledge. Brena Smith has already noted the important role that libraries can

play in supporting the field of game studies, focusing on computer science and

digital game design, while Henry Lowood has compared the development of

game studies to the formation of the history of science as an academic discipline.36 Libraries can facilitate research on video games within the fields of game

studies and humanistic and artistic inquiry in a number of ways. For instance, the

creation of subject guides that include not only technical and computer studies

approaches in relation to video games, but also that include information about art

and design and historical approaches to game studies across media can help

broaden students and researcher’s horizons. Furthermore, the co-housing of

recent exhibition catalogues and academic journals on game studies such as

Game studies, Ludica, International journal of computer games technology, or

Games and culture would allow for easy access to complementary scholarship.

Finally, in light of current research on video games as art, video game librarians

could partner with colleagues in visual resource centers to incorporate stills and

videos from video games into image databases of artworks. This could be

achieved with through high quality scans of books and catalogues or through the

use of game capture devices. The creation of clear guidelines for formal analysis

for describing these game images from the outset would best enable users to

properly understand the context of the excerpts and provide consistent metadata.

Although, like film, such images raise legal concerns about their use, properly

catalogued images of video games could be considered under the College Art

Associations guidelines for fair use for teaching and research.37

Conclusion

University collections of video games attend to the dual functions of library and

archive. The archives strain to achieve a prescient historical distance from the

artifacts of video games in an archeology of knowledge dictated by our own

interests and discourses and also to preserve the frangible technology that is

inseparable from the aesthetic content of games.38 Simultaneously the library

circulates and contextualizes video game objects to meet the needs of students

and faculty members, not neutrally providing entry into to a well formed discip-

line, but shaping the nature of our understanding of video games. Libraries pro-

vide the crucial spaces and technologies necessary for teaching and the

intellectual materials necessary to formulate and conduct research in the field of

game studies itself. Ultimately university library collections of video games and

game labs such as the Computer and Video Game Archive at the University of

Michigan serve an essential function for cutting edge pedagogy and research,

and a continued focus on giving access to multidisciplinary materials alongside

video games themselves will ensure their continued academic relevance.

35. Chris Melissinos and Patrick

O’Rourke, The Art of Video

Games: From Pac-Man to Mass

Effect (New York: Welcome

Books, 2012).

36. Brena Smith, “Twenty-First

Century Game Studies in the

Academy: Libraries and an

Emerging Discipline,” Reference

Services Review 36, no. 2 (2008):

205–20; Henry Lowood, “Game

Studies Now, History of Science

Then,” Games and Culture 1, no. 1

(January 2006): 78-82.

37. College Art Association, “The

Code of Best Practices in Fair Use

in the Visual Arts.” http://www.

collegeart.org/programs/caa-fair-

use/best-practices .

38. On historical distance and

discourse of the archive, see:

Michel Foucault, The Archaeology

of Knowledge (Paris: Éditions

Gallimard, 1969).

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Kelli Wood

Assistant Professor, Postdoctoral Scholar

University of Michigan

Dept. of the History of Art, Society of Fellows

110 Tappan Hall

855 South University Avenue

Ann Arbor, MI 48109

USA

woodkell@umich.edu

David S. Carter

Video Game Archivist, Reference Services Librarian

University of Michigan Library

2321C Duderstadt

Ann Arbor, MI 48109

USA

superman@umich.edu

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